Federico Frattini

State restructuring and subnational innovation spaces across Chinese prefectures

This paper maps the emergence of ‘subnational innovation spaces’ in China as they result from the interaction between state restructuring and the diffusion of innovative activities. Several countervailing forces have played a part in outlining a number of supra-urban regions that diverge by their own capability to develop and govern innovation-related socio-economic processes. On the one hand, the downscaling of state power enables the local administrative units to plan place-based strategies to embed technological upgrading, such as driving indigenous innovative activities to cluster around industrial and technological parks. On the other hand, this clustering entails reconfiguring socio-spatial interactions, while experiencing new networked connections to be governed. Thus, technological upgrading and state restructuring are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Following this perspective, the authors have rearranged various data sets at the prefectural level and processed them to disentangle some of the main underlying processes: first, the distribution of innovation-related ‘infrastructures’ across cities; second, the evolution of innovative activities; third, the transition towards a firm-centred Science and Technology system. These factors have been then combined together with neighbourhood relations to outline different subnational innovation spaces. The result is a country-wide map describing how the geography of innovative activities in China exhibits features that are connected to the long-term processes of transition, industrialisation and state restructuring. This picture suggests that the catching up with ‘upgraded development’ in laggard regions could be further promoted identifying ‘up-scaled’ regional hubs to coordinate the development of wider areas.

Growth convergence and local steady states across Chinese prefectures

ABSTRACT This article investigates how economic growth paths diverge across Chinese prefectural cities. Based on the conditional convergence hypothesis, the analysis includes inward foreign direct investments and patent applications to the European Patent Office as additional proxies of steady-state income levels and allows the convergence parameter to vary across groups. The results show that within-convergence rates are different across groups, but growth drivers positively affect both intraregional and interregional catching up.

Economie di agglomerazione e adozione di nuove tecnologie: un'indagine empirica condotta sull'industria meccanica in Emilia-Romagna

This paper investigates the local dynamic of technology adoption. Although the positive effects of knowledge spill-overs are well-known in literature, it is assumed that Marshallian externalities can produce side effects so that the capability to adopt technologies located outside the agglomeration space decreases. On the empirical side, technology is broadly assumed to be approximated by one patent and its adoption by a citation of that patent. Data refer to the machinery industry in Emilia-Romagna and include all the patents in the technological fields related to the machinery industry cited between 1981 and 2010 by inventors located in the region. The main explanatory variables concern the intensity of the local productive specialisation expecting that citation lags increase with agglomeration.

Gli effetti della distribuzione del reddito sulle disuguaglianze sociali. Un’analisi empirica delle differenze tra le regioni italiane

Il saggio intende mostrare la rilevanza della relazione che intercorre tra le disparita di reddito e le disuguaglianze sociali a livello regionale in una prospettiva secondo cui a) le sole variabili economiche non rendono efficacemente conto del livello di sviluppo di una comunita e b) tali fenomeni mostrano una significativa variabilita all’interno dei Paesi oltre che tra i Paesi. A questo scopo, si propone una stima per le regioni italiane nel periodo 2007-2011 dell’elasticita di sette indicatori di disagio sociale alle variazioni dell’indice di Gini che conferma le ipotesi formulate.